Café Mouffe: Rupa and the April Fishes

Rupa is a doctor in San Francisco as well as a singer-songwriter. Born in SF, she was raised in India and France. As the title of her new CD, eXtraordinary Rendition, suggests, she is a citizen of the world with global concerns. She tells the back story of Une Americaine À Paris in a recent interview on PRI’s The World:

I was in Paris for about a week, playing music and writing music, by myself, and I had spent two days, writing, writing, writing, I didn’t talk to anybody, I was just sitting by myself.

Y avait quelques jours en silence, j’ai pas dit un mot…

[The song begins, ‘There were a few silent days, I didn’t say a word.’]

And I was in a café, and this man came and sat next to me, and he’s like, are you writing a novel, and I said, no I’m writing songs, and we had this wonderful conversation, oh what kind of music do you like, oh what kind of film do you like, and we kept going back and forth, it was such a wonderful warm conversation, until I asked him where he was from. And he said he was from Algeria. And he says where are you from, and I said, I’m from San Francisco.”

Tu n’as pas peur d’être ici à Paris, avec tous ces Arabes fâchés?…

It was just this wall came down between us, and he said, well aren’t you afraid to be an American in Paris with all these angry Arabs. If you were in my neighborhood, cwwkk, and he made the beheading motion. And a part of me was like, who is this man, I am afraid. But then I just looked at him, and I was like, no I’m not afraid, I think there’s too much of that right now.”

Café Mouffe opens every Friday at 3:00 p.m. Please drop by for a listen and a chat. Sometimes the embedded videos don’t work here due to bandwidth constraints, but you’ll always find links to video sources in the set notes. Try them. If you’re curious about the Mouffe, here’s the original idea behind it’s creation.

Letting Go of Sight

I’ve canoed on Lake Superior for almost as many years as I’ve been losing eyesight. I return year after year like a migrating loon to learn the other side of a slow, uncertain process that we could call “going blind.” After 35 years with the lake as my teacher, I know what lies on the other side. I call it letting go of sight. Read Big Water. See more about the Great Lakes.

Not This Pig

If there is an emerging genetic underclass, I could run for class president or class clown. Read more in Not This Pig (2003).

Media in Transition @ MiT

Disabled Americans today have to negotiate for the kinds of accommodations made for FDR, and the caveat “reasonable accommodation” is built into the law. President Franklin Roosevelt did not have to negotiate. He could summon vast resources of the federal government – money as well as brains – to accomplish the work of disability. And it was accomplished with such thoroughness and efficiency that its scale could be called the Accessibility-Industrial Complex had it been directed toward public accommodations and not solely the needs of a single man. Read FDR and the Hidden Work of Disability [MiT8 2013]

Shepard Fairey claimed that his posterization of a copyrighted AP news photo of Barack Obama was a transformative work protected by the fair use doctrine. In other words, it was a shape-shifter. I claim fair use, too, when I reproduce and transform copyrighted works into media formats that are accessible to me as a blind reader. Read Shape-Shifters in the Fair Use Lab [MiT6 2009]

The social engineers who created a system for licensing beggars in New York never imagined that a blind woman had culture or could make culture. She herself may not have imagined it, either. In the moment when Paul Strand photographed her surreptitiously on the street in 1916, he could not have expected that one day blind photographers would reverse the camera’s gaze. Read Curiosity & The Blind Photographer. [MiT5 2007]